Andrew Humphreys, Raving Upon Thames: An Untold Story of Sixties London (London: Paradise Road 2021)
Counter to the prevailing idea that culture is disseminated from a hip centre by an irrepressible centrifugal force, in truth the worthwhile things take form first at the margins and then are dragged toward a hub, Soho say. Andrew Humphreys’ wholly enjoyable and needle-sharp history of the bands and venues, entrepreneurs and audiences in and around Richmond in the sixties is a testament to the fact that the real stories, the one’s that matter, belong first to the suburbs.
From 1960, but could have been from anytime from then until the end of the 1980s. The title page from a Weekend exposé of the Eel Pie Island scene. Reproduced in Raving
The availability of venues – The Station Hotel, Richmond Athletic Ground and Eel Pie Island – can partly explain why Richmond became the centre for the early activities of the Stones, who were closely followed by the Yardbirds and all those bands that thought they could read their own names in the contrails left in the wake of Mick Jagger. But more importantly, it was the art schools, teacher training colleges and further and higher education institutions, in and around the area, that meant there was a big enough demographic of young people who wanted to make a culture of their own, which in turn created the scene. The Stones and the ‘Birds found that audience as much as the audience found them.
Humphrey’s book gives a small cameo to The Others who produced one of the finest RnB pounders of the era and then vanished into utter obscurity
1964: The Others from the same management stable as The Pretty Things and The Fairies and with the same poise, attitude and style
My parents met in the ’50s at St. Mary’s teacher training college, opposite Richmond Lock. I doubt they went to Eel Pie Island to dance to the jazz and I know they never looked as wonderfully bohemian as their peers pictured here. My dad’s second wife did, however, see the Stones at the Station Hotel. She lived in Gunnersbury about two and a half miles from the venue, after one of the gigs Brian Jones had given her the bus fare she needed to get home. She missed her bus or chose to walk, either way she kept his gift. When I got to know her in the early Seventies she still had that pile of pennies, which she kept on the mantelpiece.
Inside the dance hall Eel Pie Island
That brief moment before a band moves from being entertainment for the in-crowd to becoming revered is the story told in Raving Upon Thames. The Stones and the Yardbirds have a ready familiarity but that is more than compensated for by Humphreys’ fine-eye for contextual detail and the way he so effectively musters a myriad walk-on parts for those who may have left only the faintest trace of having passed that way. With the eye of a detective he shows how their trails, when pulled together, make up a map of the times more revealing than any star’s biography.
One such trace was the pen letter a 16 year-old, Andrea Hiorns, wrote to her American friend, it is a perfect encapsulation of why Humphreys’ history is so much more than just about the local.
Wednesdays are good days. I go to my Island. I must tell you all about it, it is an important part of my life. It’s in the River Thames. You cross a steep bridge over the river and pay a toll of 4d to an old lady called Rose. Then walk along a winding road with bungalows on either side. There’s lots of trees and its dark and mysterious. You turn a bend and see a large decrepit hotel and a crumbling façade. You hear loud blues music. Walk through the gates and you are in another world. All material cares disappear and we are the only people who exist.
There’s a large converted barn, you go down some steps after conning your way in with 6d – it’s usually 3/6d – your wrist is stamped and you go down. It’s very dark with just red and green lights. Long John Baldry is singing with his band at one end of the hall. The walls are white flaking and full of cobwebs, with cartoons, murals and names printed over them. People dance there crazily. Next door is the pub, where we and the musicians all congregate, we con drinks and play the jukebox and talk to everyone. I often go there on my own but always end up meeting someone I know to dance with.
Outside there is a long strip of grass down to the river with large stone nuts and bolts lying around and convenient bushes where couples make love and smoke hash. It’s the coolest place in England, there’s nowhere else like it.
